


Grass

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Series: And They Fell Like Dominoes [6]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 10:37:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4016548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of a filthy rich boy and a clever dick girl at one of the world's most prestigious universities; of cheap wine and red plush; of betrayal, and bad blood, and her reading glasses. This time, he tells her a lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grass

**Author's Note:**

> Migrated from my Tumblr. Here be F words, and a lot of other words besides.

“Would it bother you if I went?”

She has her head bent over the book, an antiquarian volume she borrowed from the library with no intention of giving it back. She’s not looking at him (because when she looks at him, she thinks about buying books instead of nicking them, which is not on), and he’s sitting as far away from her as possible while staying within earshot; he likes to hear what she says when she speaks, and to smell the grass, and to sit under a sky which promises the end of term.

“For the summer?”

“Forever.”

Ollie turns his face up to the light, which filters whitely through his eyelids (they’re red on the inside). He met Annie on the last Friday of the first term of their first year, at a party where they drank from plastic glasses. He was and is and remains Olivier d’Athos, heir to an empire, but she was and is and remains Annie, the only daughter of somebody whose name doesn’t merit nods and smiles and claps on the back in the quad. She was his Annie for a year, and he’s coming to understand that she didn’t mean to break them. It was Thomas being Thomas, no excuse except the same old crap about boys who lose their stupid heads over pretty girls (and there was never any excuse for hating Annie, and blaming Annie, and pushing Annie away).

But he still keeps the distance between them.

“It’s a free country. You can do whatever you want.”

“But I can’t, can I?” Now she’s looking, now she’s looking at him out of the corner of her eye without realising he’s looking at her (because he thinks about nicking things when he looks at her, namely the kiss right out of her mouth). He remembers going no further with her after that party than the moth-eaten red settee, going no further than all the way. Ollie remembers falling in love with Annie then and there, and her bitten nails scraping his scalp, and the pallid insides of her elbows. Ollie falls in love with Annie every five seconds, it seems, which is why he’s choosing to stare into his own eyelids again. “There’s always going to be something between us. We’re all tangled with each other, and Thomas and Ninon –” She swallows. The green flavour of May is thick in the back of her throat.

She wants to ask him about the summer, and forever, and whether or not he’d make her pay if she leaned over, leaned her head on his shoulder. She wants to go back to the way it was, before she introduced him to beans on toast, to that exact day, the day she introduced him to beans on toast. Life is coming at them, thick and fast, and if she could lie on top of him on this perfectly trimmed quadrangle of grass, maybe it wouldn't. She wants to ask.

He wants to ask her to marry him, or to wait for him to grow up (or both).

Either way, they’re far too fucking young to be in love like this.


End file.
